SNEAK PEEK
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1. Marilyn
As the dark road twisted and snaked under their headlights, and the white lines on the pavement skipped hypnotically beneath them, Marilyn Powell blinked sleep from her eyes, fighting it off as one would fight any other dangerous temptation. She kept both hands on the wheel. Her head was slightly bowed, struggling as much to keep her chin up as she struggled to keep her eyes open. When she felt all too close to dozing off she rolled down her window and let the cool air rush in. The salty tang of ocean waves carried with it, sharp and rousing. She looked concernedly to the passenger seat as she drove, where six-year-old Emmie Powell slept rather soundly. The little girl’s head lolled toward her shoulder, eyes shut sweetly as the wind through the window blew strands of hair about her sleeping face. Too small to be sitting up front, really—legally speaking, of course—but as the backseat was full of their belongings, it left Marilyn with few other options. It’s the best I can do. I’m not a bad mother. Not like they say… |
She looked to the road, wrung the wheel in both hands, her narrowed eyes transfixed by the painted lines dashing in their eternal rhythm ahead.
They can’t take her away from me. They won’t take her away from me. She’s not theirs to take. They don’t know what’s best. How could they possibly know what’s best…
She inhaled the ocean air, took one final lungful, and then rolled the window back up. She swept her own wind-blown hair out of her face, smoothed it back behind her ear. She’d staved off sleep for a while longer. Long enough to get them to their next pitstop, she hoped. She eyed the needle on the fuel gauge—a quarter tank left.
The road ahead seemed to stretch without end along the coast. Dark and empty. Just the two of them, she thought, traveling through the moonless night with nowhere to go and nowhere to be but gone…
Gone and far, far away. Across state lines where they’ll never find us. Never see us again. They won’t know where to look. Not for a long time, at least…
Marilyn startled as suddenly Emmie was rustling in her seat, sitting straighter with her sleepy eyes barely open. She peered out the passenger window at the darkness there—daylight as far off as their destination.
“Where are we?” Emmie asked, rubbing her tired eyes.
“We’re nowhere. Not yet. Go back to sleep.”
“Where are we going?”
Marilyn sighed. “Someplace far away from home, Emmie. Somewhere neither of us has been before.”
Emmie was quiet for a time, perhaps reflecting on this. She continued watching the indiscernible shapes of the land and the road moving silently by outside.
“Will gramma and grampa be there, too?”
Marilyn clenched her teeth. She contemplated not answering the question at all, as her heart started to pound and her nerves started to fray at just the thought.
“No, “she said finally. “It’s gramma and grampa we’re getting away from…”
Surprisingly, Emmie didn’t ask anything else after that. She sat quietly and watched out the window, her once-tired eyes strangely wide and bright now, shimmering with private anxieties. Perhaps she sensed the tension in her mother’s voice, was all. Or perhaps she merely feared what it all meant. Going away, leaving everything behind. It must have been a scary thought, certainly. Aimlessly heading into the unknown, and simply trusting that the adult in charge had everything in control. Then again, maybe she knew exactly what her mother’s plan was—or what it wasn’t, rather—and feared the uncertainty, the distinct sense of there being no plan at all. She watched her mother at the helm with an unspoken terror gnawing at her, like watching a surgeon fumble his or her instruments and wondering how safe in their hands you truly were…
Stop it, Marilyn. She’s only six. She doesn’t know anything. You’re being crazy…
Sometimes Marilyn got the feeling Emmie knew just who her mother was—the unredeemable fuck-up that her parents proclaimed her to be. They’d probably filled Emmie’s head with such ideas. Babysitting? Ha! More like indoctrination sessions, Marilyn thought. Brainwashing. Turning Emmie against her from the start before she might ever know any better. Mr. And Mrs. Powell scratched their heads wondering how their once-sweet daughter, Marilyn, turned out to be such a disappointment, and yet they also scratched their heads wondering how she’d managed to create such a lovely angel in Emmie…
They take the credit, of course. They babysit once in a while and somehow think that means they’ve raised her more than I have. Better than I have. They think… they think…
Still clenching her jaw, Marilyn turned on the radio. She spun the dial until the first clear station came through. Oldies. She turned up the volume—hell, Emmie was already awake—letting the sound drown out any other intrusive thoughts she might have.
She gripped the wheel so that her knuckles were cold and white, as if fearful she’d lose control at any moment.
* * *
She found herself once more on the brink of sleep—battling to keep her mind coherent and her eyes trained on the winding road—when she happened to glance into the rearview mirror and noticed flashing lights coming up out of the darkness in their wake. Red and blue.
Flashing, spiralling, gaining.
Her heart turned to ice in her chest.
“Oh, please be joking…” she muttered.
Nevertheless, as the lights came closer she signaled obediently and pulled off onto the shoulder. They slowed to a stop. Emmie was still awake, and upon noticing the flashing lights, she pulled at her seatbelt and turned in her seat to peer through the rear windshield.
“Sit down,” Marilyn told her. “And be extra quiet while mommy speaks to the officer, okay?”
Not that Emmie ever had any trouble keeping quiet. She was the embodiment of quiet.
Marilyn swallowed nervously as the highway cruiser pulled up behind them. Looking into the rearview mirror, those flashing lights were all she saw, winking and blinding. The night washed out to nothing in their light, pitch black. The uniformed officer stepped out. A man, she saw. He strolled leisurely along the side of the road, his body half-silhouetted, half-revealed in the flashing red and blue. Marilyn rolled down her window as he approached. She cleared her throat, then put on her most convincing smile as he bent near her window.
“Hey there,” he said.
His face was only half visible in the same flashing red-and-blue tones, but from what Marilyn could tell he was astonishingly handsome. Sharp, squared jaw. Stubbled. His dark brown eyes glowed with the light in them. Perhaps it was only Marilyn’s fatigue, but she could have sworn there was something in the way he looked at her. An intense, almost critical stare. Suspicion, she thought.
He knows who you are. He’s been looking for you.
“You know why I pulled you over?” he asked.
She hated that question. Despised it. She wondered if officers knew just how cliche they sounded when they said it. Did they get it from the movies, she thought, or was it the other way around? Either way, she shook her head in reply.
“You were driving a bit erratically back there.” He turned to peer down the dark road behind them. “You’re not falling asleep at the wheel, are you?”
“No,” Marilyn answered immediately. She made a conscious effort to widen her eyes as she smiled, as if to show just how awake she was. “No, I’m fine.”
“You look pretty tired to me,” he said. “What’s your name?”
She wondered why he hadn’t asked for her license or registration. Wasn’t that usually part of the shtick, too?
“Marilyn,” she said.
“Nice to meet you, Marilyn.” He leaned aside and peered into the car at the young child seated beside her. Marilyn’s heart was a gong now, clanging violently under her ribs. “And who’s this?”
Marilyn glanced to Emmie, as if to double-check for herself.
“She’s my daughter.”
“Your daughter?” the officer said. “I would have guessed your sister. And that’s not me being funny…”
He didn’t smile as he said it, making good on his word. But Marilyn laughed all the same, playing along to the best of her abilities.
“No, she’s my daughter.”
I know she’s too little to be sitting up front. I know that. You don’t have to tell me. Please don’t fine me or arrest me or whatever else. I know.
“You two moving somewhere?” he asked, noting all the boxes and bags in the backseat.
“Yes,” Marilyn said.
“Yeah? Where to?”
Marilyn stared ahead into the light of their headlights, the dark road disappearing beyond its furthest reaches. She chewed the inside of her lip, thinking of a lie she might tell.
“We’re moving back home,” she said finally. “To my parents.”
“Oh, I see. And where’s that?”
None of your goddamn business, she thought.
She was still gripping the wheel fearfully tight. She stared distantly at her hands there, thinking of another lie and at the same time realizing just how thin this plan of hers really was—as thin as the skin stretched over those icy knuckles of hers.
“Connecticut.”
The officer peered likewise into the distance, into the direction of their travel, considering.
“You’ve still got a ways to go, then,” he said. Marilyn flinched as he suddenly slapped the bottom of her open window. “Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal.”
Marilyn eyed the officer’s hand on her car door, his long and oddly delicate fingers curling across the rolled-down window.
“A deal?”
“Yeah,” he said. He smiled then, but it barely reached his eyes. “You promise to do this one thing for me, and I won’t trouble you any longer.”
“Promise what?”
The officer looked ahead into the late night.
“Not far from here, you’ll arrive in the town of Brightport. There’s a motel there called Sleeper’s Paradise. I want you to stop there for the night and take care of yourself. Get a good night’s sleep so you can start the rest of your drive fresh in the morning. It would make me feel a whole lot better knowing you were there instead of finding you crashed somewhere along the highway because you fell asleep at the wheel.”
“I’m not falling asleep,” Marilyn lied.
“Just do this for me, all right? Tell the clerk that Dean Sherry recommended the place and they’ll give you a good deal on a room. It won’t cost you a dime, in fact. Got it?”
Marilyn considered the offer. It was strange that he should care so much, wasn’t it?
“Not only is your daughter much too small to be riding up front like she is,” officer Dean Sherry went on, “but you’re much too tired to be at the wheel, anyhow. Don’t deny it, I can tell. That’s just far too much risk for my liking. Wouldn’t you agree?”
She was far too tired for this bullshit, Marilyn thought. She regarded her daughter beside her, timid and wide-eyed, making not a peep.
Do the responsible thing for once in your worthless life. It’s free. It’s practically charity. Wouldn’t you like to sleep in a bed, at least? You’ve got no idea where you’re headed, or if there will be any beds at all when you get there. You might be sleeping in your car for a good while after this. You worthless… worthless…
“Fine,” Marilyn answered. “I’ll… I’ll do that.”
“Will you?” The officer seemed to brighten in the dark, genuinely pleased to hear it. “It’d make my night a whole lot less anxious knowing you’re not out here swerving on the highway with such…” His eyes flickered toward Emmie in the passenger seat. “…precious cargo.”
An odd chill tickled its way up the back of Marilyn’s neck. She nodded, desperate to say goodbye and to finally roll up her window. The officer seemed warm enough, but there was certainly something strange about him. Something a little… off.
“Sleeper’s Paradise, you said?” Marilyn regarded her white-knuckled hands on the wheel. Her foot involuntarily weighed itself upon the accelerator, eager to get moving.
“That’s right. In Brightport. It’s the next town. You’ll be passing through not far from here.”
“Okay. I’ll do as you say.”
She put on a wide, toothy, congenial smile just for him.
“Alrighty then. Drive safe, Marilyn.”
Officer Dean Sherry slapped her window one last time before he straightened and started back to his cruiser. Marilyn followed him in her side mirror, watching his slender, uniformed silhouette saunter back in the flashing lights. When he climbed back into his vehicle, the lights shut off and only his headlights shined behind them, glaring in Marilyn’s rearview. She waited, hoping he’d leave first. It didn’t seem he would—waiting for them, apparently.
“Are we going to a motel?” Emmie asked.
Marilyn put the car in drive. She pulled them off the road’s shoulder and started off once more. She glanced frequently into her rearview and watched as the cruiser’s headlights shrank behind them with distance. Then, upon her final glance back, she watched as those headlights turned themselves in a wide arc across the road and the officer departed in the opposite direction. Marilyn sighed a breath of relief.
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re going to a motel.”
***
They can’t take her away from me. They won’t take her away from me. She’s not theirs to take. They don’t know what’s best. How could they possibly know what’s best…
She inhaled the ocean air, took one final lungful, and then rolled the window back up. She swept her own wind-blown hair out of her face, smoothed it back behind her ear. She’d staved off sleep for a while longer. Long enough to get them to their next pitstop, she hoped. She eyed the needle on the fuel gauge—a quarter tank left.
The road ahead seemed to stretch without end along the coast. Dark and empty. Just the two of them, she thought, traveling through the moonless night with nowhere to go and nowhere to be but gone…
Gone and far, far away. Across state lines where they’ll never find us. Never see us again. They won’t know where to look. Not for a long time, at least…
Marilyn startled as suddenly Emmie was rustling in her seat, sitting straighter with her sleepy eyes barely open. She peered out the passenger window at the darkness there—daylight as far off as their destination.
“Where are we?” Emmie asked, rubbing her tired eyes.
“We’re nowhere. Not yet. Go back to sleep.”
“Where are we going?”
Marilyn sighed. “Someplace far away from home, Emmie. Somewhere neither of us has been before.”
Emmie was quiet for a time, perhaps reflecting on this. She continued watching the indiscernible shapes of the land and the road moving silently by outside.
“Will gramma and grampa be there, too?”
Marilyn clenched her teeth. She contemplated not answering the question at all, as her heart started to pound and her nerves started to fray at just the thought.
“No, “she said finally. “It’s gramma and grampa we’re getting away from…”
Surprisingly, Emmie didn’t ask anything else after that. She sat quietly and watched out the window, her once-tired eyes strangely wide and bright now, shimmering with private anxieties. Perhaps she sensed the tension in her mother’s voice, was all. Or perhaps she merely feared what it all meant. Going away, leaving everything behind. It must have been a scary thought, certainly. Aimlessly heading into the unknown, and simply trusting that the adult in charge had everything in control. Then again, maybe she knew exactly what her mother’s plan was—or what it wasn’t, rather—and feared the uncertainty, the distinct sense of there being no plan at all. She watched her mother at the helm with an unspoken terror gnawing at her, like watching a surgeon fumble his or her instruments and wondering how safe in their hands you truly were…
Stop it, Marilyn. She’s only six. She doesn’t know anything. You’re being crazy…
Sometimes Marilyn got the feeling Emmie knew just who her mother was—the unredeemable fuck-up that her parents proclaimed her to be. They’d probably filled Emmie’s head with such ideas. Babysitting? Ha! More like indoctrination sessions, Marilyn thought. Brainwashing. Turning Emmie against her from the start before she might ever know any better. Mr. And Mrs. Powell scratched their heads wondering how their once-sweet daughter, Marilyn, turned out to be such a disappointment, and yet they also scratched their heads wondering how she’d managed to create such a lovely angel in Emmie…
They take the credit, of course. They babysit once in a while and somehow think that means they’ve raised her more than I have. Better than I have. They think… they think…
Still clenching her jaw, Marilyn turned on the radio. She spun the dial until the first clear station came through. Oldies. She turned up the volume—hell, Emmie was already awake—letting the sound drown out any other intrusive thoughts she might have.
She gripped the wheel so that her knuckles were cold and white, as if fearful she’d lose control at any moment.
* * *
She found herself once more on the brink of sleep—battling to keep her mind coherent and her eyes trained on the winding road—when she happened to glance into the rearview mirror and noticed flashing lights coming up out of the darkness in their wake. Red and blue.
Flashing, spiralling, gaining.
Her heart turned to ice in her chest.
“Oh, please be joking…” she muttered.
Nevertheless, as the lights came closer she signaled obediently and pulled off onto the shoulder. They slowed to a stop. Emmie was still awake, and upon noticing the flashing lights, she pulled at her seatbelt and turned in her seat to peer through the rear windshield.
“Sit down,” Marilyn told her. “And be extra quiet while mommy speaks to the officer, okay?”
Not that Emmie ever had any trouble keeping quiet. She was the embodiment of quiet.
Marilyn swallowed nervously as the highway cruiser pulled up behind them. Looking into the rearview mirror, those flashing lights were all she saw, winking and blinding. The night washed out to nothing in their light, pitch black. The uniformed officer stepped out. A man, she saw. He strolled leisurely along the side of the road, his body half-silhouetted, half-revealed in the flashing red and blue. Marilyn rolled down her window as he approached. She cleared her throat, then put on her most convincing smile as he bent near her window.
“Hey there,” he said.
His face was only half visible in the same flashing red-and-blue tones, but from what Marilyn could tell he was astonishingly handsome. Sharp, squared jaw. Stubbled. His dark brown eyes glowed with the light in them. Perhaps it was only Marilyn’s fatigue, but she could have sworn there was something in the way he looked at her. An intense, almost critical stare. Suspicion, she thought.
He knows who you are. He’s been looking for you.
“You know why I pulled you over?” he asked.
She hated that question. Despised it. She wondered if officers knew just how cliche they sounded when they said it. Did they get it from the movies, she thought, or was it the other way around? Either way, she shook her head in reply.
“You were driving a bit erratically back there.” He turned to peer down the dark road behind them. “You’re not falling asleep at the wheel, are you?”
“No,” Marilyn answered immediately. She made a conscious effort to widen her eyes as she smiled, as if to show just how awake she was. “No, I’m fine.”
“You look pretty tired to me,” he said. “What’s your name?”
She wondered why he hadn’t asked for her license or registration. Wasn’t that usually part of the shtick, too?
“Marilyn,” she said.
“Nice to meet you, Marilyn.” He leaned aside and peered into the car at the young child seated beside her. Marilyn’s heart was a gong now, clanging violently under her ribs. “And who’s this?”
Marilyn glanced to Emmie, as if to double-check for herself.
“She’s my daughter.”
“Your daughter?” the officer said. “I would have guessed your sister. And that’s not me being funny…”
He didn’t smile as he said it, making good on his word. But Marilyn laughed all the same, playing along to the best of her abilities.
“No, she’s my daughter.”
I know she’s too little to be sitting up front. I know that. You don’t have to tell me. Please don’t fine me or arrest me or whatever else. I know.
“You two moving somewhere?” he asked, noting all the boxes and bags in the backseat.
“Yes,” Marilyn said.
“Yeah? Where to?”
Marilyn stared ahead into the light of their headlights, the dark road disappearing beyond its furthest reaches. She chewed the inside of her lip, thinking of a lie she might tell.
“We’re moving back home,” she said finally. “To my parents.”
“Oh, I see. And where’s that?”
None of your goddamn business, she thought.
She was still gripping the wheel fearfully tight. She stared distantly at her hands there, thinking of another lie and at the same time realizing just how thin this plan of hers really was—as thin as the skin stretched over those icy knuckles of hers.
“Connecticut.”
The officer peered likewise into the distance, into the direction of their travel, considering.
“You’ve still got a ways to go, then,” he said. Marilyn flinched as he suddenly slapped the bottom of her open window. “Tell you what. I’ll make you a deal.”
Marilyn eyed the officer’s hand on her car door, his long and oddly delicate fingers curling across the rolled-down window.
“A deal?”
“Yeah,” he said. He smiled then, but it barely reached his eyes. “You promise to do this one thing for me, and I won’t trouble you any longer.”
“Promise what?”
The officer looked ahead into the late night.
“Not far from here, you’ll arrive in the town of Brightport. There’s a motel there called Sleeper’s Paradise. I want you to stop there for the night and take care of yourself. Get a good night’s sleep so you can start the rest of your drive fresh in the morning. It would make me feel a whole lot better knowing you were there instead of finding you crashed somewhere along the highway because you fell asleep at the wheel.”
“I’m not falling asleep,” Marilyn lied.
“Just do this for me, all right? Tell the clerk that Dean Sherry recommended the place and they’ll give you a good deal on a room. It won’t cost you a dime, in fact. Got it?”
Marilyn considered the offer. It was strange that he should care so much, wasn’t it?
“Not only is your daughter much too small to be riding up front like she is,” officer Dean Sherry went on, “but you’re much too tired to be at the wheel, anyhow. Don’t deny it, I can tell. That’s just far too much risk for my liking. Wouldn’t you agree?”
She was far too tired for this bullshit, Marilyn thought. She regarded her daughter beside her, timid and wide-eyed, making not a peep.
Do the responsible thing for once in your worthless life. It’s free. It’s practically charity. Wouldn’t you like to sleep in a bed, at least? You’ve got no idea where you’re headed, or if there will be any beds at all when you get there. You might be sleeping in your car for a good while after this. You worthless… worthless…
“Fine,” Marilyn answered. “I’ll… I’ll do that.”
“Will you?” The officer seemed to brighten in the dark, genuinely pleased to hear it. “It’d make my night a whole lot less anxious knowing you’re not out here swerving on the highway with such…” His eyes flickered toward Emmie in the passenger seat. “…precious cargo.”
An odd chill tickled its way up the back of Marilyn’s neck. She nodded, desperate to say goodbye and to finally roll up her window. The officer seemed warm enough, but there was certainly something strange about him. Something a little… off.
“Sleeper’s Paradise, you said?” Marilyn regarded her white-knuckled hands on the wheel. Her foot involuntarily weighed itself upon the accelerator, eager to get moving.
“That’s right. In Brightport. It’s the next town. You’ll be passing through not far from here.”
“Okay. I’ll do as you say.”
She put on a wide, toothy, congenial smile just for him.
“Alrighty then. Drive safe, Marilyn.”
Officer Dean Sherry slapped her window one last time before he straightened and started back to his cruiser. Marilyn followed him in her side mirror, watching his slender, uniformed silhouette saunter back in the flashing lights. When he climbed back into his vehicle, the lights shut off and only his headlights shined behind them, glaring in Marilyn’s rearview. She waited, hoping he’d leave first. It didn’t seem he would—waiting for them, apparently.
“Are we going to a motel?” Emmie asked.
Marilyn put the car in drive. She pulled them off the road’s shoulder and started off once more. She glanced frequently into her rearview and watched as the cruiser’s headlights shrank behind them with distance. Then, upon her final glance back, she watched as those headlights turned themselves in a wide arc across the road and the officer departed in the opposite direction. Marilyn sighed a breath of relief.
“Yeah,” she said. “We’re going to a motel.”
***